Regular readers of this blog (both of you), and regular listeners of This Week in Virology (all 10,000-plus of you) are by now quite familiar with a fellow named Andrew Wakefield, and the epic and ongoing public health catastrophe he perpetrated. That story began in 1998, when Wakefield and several coauthors published a paper in The Lancet that purported to show a link between autism and vaccination with the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) shot. If you don’t know what happened after that, or how utterly that notion has been discredited, take a few minutes to read up on it. I’ll wait.

As we all now know, Wakefield’s original study was not only tiny, unrepresentative, poorly controlled and vastly overclaimed in the media, it was also unethical and fraudulent. Indeed, all of the authors except Wakefield have since repudiated the work, and The Lancet has retracted the paper.

However, some sharp researchers actually foresaw much of this and wrote a commentary to that effect in the very same issue of the journal where Wakefield’s paper appeared. Had that commentary been given the same media exposure as the paper, much of the ensuing disaster could have been avoided. If we’re going to derive any benefit at all from this whole tragedy, then everyone should go and read that commentary. It provides a perfect case study of the importance of critically analyzing clinical data.

Unfortunately, unless you’re at a university that already subscribes to The Lancet, you’ll have to pay a hefty fee to Elsevier, the journal’s publisher. That’s right: this critically important document from one of the most damaging and costly frauds in the history of science is locked in a vault.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ve done some work for Elsevier subsidiaries over the years – they previously owned Drug Discovery and Development and Bioscience Technology, two journals for which I write regularly. That said, I’ve sometimes disagreed with the company’s decisions, and this is one of those times.

Thinking it was merely an oversight, one of my TWiV co-hosts, Rich Condit, decided to send a polite request for Elsevier to open this particular paper to the public:

To whom it may concern:

I am writing to request that the 1998 Lancet comment by Chen and DeStefano on the Wakefield autism/MMR vaccine article in the same issue be made open access on your site. The reference for the comment in question is:

I am a co-host on a podcast called “This Week in Virology” (www.twiv.tv). Each week we discuss topics of interest in virology. We also post “science picks of the week”, miscellaneous items that we think may be of interest to our listeners. I would like to use the Chen and DeStefano article as a pick of the week, but it is behind a paywall so that our listeners would not be able to access it, and posting the pdf would be a copyright violation.

This comment essentially debunks the now famous and retracted article by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues linking autism with the MMR vaccine. The comment is of considerable public interest because it quite accurately discredits the Wakefield report and also anticipates the damage it would do, and is published in the same issue of Lancet that contained the Wakefield article. It was apparently essentially ignored and yet was prescient. I would like the public to be able to have free access to this important comment as a lesson in how these things might be avoided in the future.

TWiV has about 7000-10,000 regular listeners so this is a good way to communicate this important message.

Rich got a prompt reply from an autoresponder script, which informed him that all requests regarding rights and permissions had to be filed through a particular web site. He did that, and got a receipt indicating that his request had been submitted, presumably for an actual human to review. A short time later, he got this:

Dear Dr. Richard Condit,

Your order 500611163 has been denied as a result of the following: Permission Denied . You will not be charged for this order and a credit will be issued for any monies submitted in this regard to date.

I can’t even count how many ways this is wrong. The now-retracted Wakefield article is available free of charge, and has been for awhile. It requires signing up for The Lancet’s site, but costs nothing. Meanwhile, Chen and DeStefano’s thorough and prescient analysis of this steaming pile of crap is behind a paywall, and apparently Elsevier has no intention of changing that. The fraud is free, the truth is locked up, and that’s how the publisher wants it.